We were all wrong about Daphne

She was once the woman we loved to hate. But by the time The White Lotus shut its doors, carefree, nonchalant, pitiless Daphne was the only likeable character.

She was once the woman we loved to hate. But by the time The White Lotus shut its doors, carefree, nonchalant, pitiless Daphne was the only likeable character.

Meghann Fahy’s resolutely delightful, boho-draped, spritz-slugging Daphne had me eating crow by the end of season 2 of Mike White’s The White Lotus. 

Through Daphne, Mike White held a mirror to my crueler impulses. 

At the season’s start, I was quick to write her off as the basic bitch bimbo it feels good to hate. The moneyed, loved-up wife of a jerk-off finance bro, with a too-colourful and creepily feminine wardrobe. A lapsed voter who loves the fuzzy and cloying Ted Lasso, and whose wealth and privilege lets her tap out of how awful the real world is. (“I don’t read the news, it’s too sad.”)

Daphne is the Zimmermann-draped Paddington yummy mummy with the Bugallo and the perfect balayage that I use as a punching bag for my internalised misogyny. The kind of woman that seems to have it all — that my friends and I mock relentlessly because we can’t hack that she lives a gorgeous life that we all want and will never get. If I were to cross paths with a real life Daphne, I probably wouldn’t try getting to know her.

It was all too easy to side with Aubrey Plaza’s kvetchy Harper. At least she was self-aware, and riddled with guilt about her upward mobility. She spoke with the familiar, highly-strung parlance of someone that has spent way too long doom-scrolling — an iron-forged cynic, attuned with the world’s ills. But as the season wore on, Harper’s stick-in-the-mud routine seriously started to bum me out. I found myself yearning for Daphne’s twisted wisdom and prosecco-fizz optimism. 

It was in the third episode, when Daphne whisks Harper away to munch down edibles at a palazzo in Noto and gets real about her and Cameron’s relationship — the shared infidelities, and marital mind games — that Daphne struck me as a woman with agency. She may not be able to control her situation, but she has some say can decide how she's going to feel about it.

Theo James in the new season of The White Lotus. Picture: Binge/HBO

If you think Daphne's laissez-faire approach to Cameron's cheating is a cope, fair play. I don't.

Daphne isn't some unhappy, wounded housewife, lost and skulking around picking up after her kids. She is a woman with a solid sense of identity that is deeply and madly in love with her husband, playing hide and seek on a luxurious Italian vacation.

She knows that she can't change Cameron, so she accepts him for all his shortcomings, and has fun with it. “Do what you have to do to make yourself feel better about it," she tells Ethan, in that climactic final monologue. Why agonise, when you can knock off your hot personal trainer? 

When I think about Daphne, particularly her final conversation with Ethan, where, silently, her face seems to run through the entire gamut of emotions: shock, devastation, betrayal, and acceptance, I can't help but be reminded of this passage from Joan Didion's seminal essay on Self Respect: 

“There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation."